


Fires

by pontmercyfriend



Series: Danger Days [2]
Category: Bandom, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), My Chemical Romance, The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: Brainwashing, Cats, Dubious Ethics, Fire, Gen, Global Warming, Medication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:13:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22778506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pontmercyfriend/pseuds/pontmercyfriend
Summary: The world doesn’t end with a bang or a whimper, when it comes down to it; it’s a gradual process, a slow decaying of civilization, an apocalypse that moves sluggishly over the globe in fractions. It isn’t easy to pinpoint one catalyst – the fires that devastate the West Coast, the expansive nature of thermonuclear warfare, the high-grade bombs dropped across nations. It isn’t as simple as marking an X on the calendar,the zombie flu started on October 7th, 2005, or rewriting the history books. In fact, there aren’t many history books written about the subject while it’s happening at all, and when therearehistory books – years and years after everything ended – they tell a very different story.
Series: Danger Days [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1636693
Comments: 2
Kudos: 48





	Fires

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spacestationtrustfund](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/gifts).



The world doesn’t end with a bang or a whimper, when it comes down to it; it’s a gradual process, a slow decaying of civilization, an apocalypse that moves sluggishly over the globe in fractions. It isn’t easy to pinpoint one catalyst – the fires that devastate the West Coast, the expansive nature of thermonuclear warfare, the high-grade bombs dropped across nations. It isn’t as simple as marking an X on the calendar, _the zombie flu started on October 7th, 2005_ , or rewriting the history books. In fact, there aren’t many history books written about the subject while it’s happening at all, and when there _are_ history books – years and years after everything ended – they tell a very different story.

The fires start in 2012.

He is thirteen years old, and he lives in a city somewhere in California.

There are four body bags in the detainment chamber. White fabric. Black outlines. Appropriate. Regulation.

He types out the details meticulously on his FlatScreen. Height at time of apprehension. Weight at time of apprehension. Sustained injuries. He has the underlings unzip the body bags and arrange the contents. Everything will be better by the time the Scarecrow comes to review his work.

The bodies are warm—perhaps _still_ , perhaps due to the internal temperature regulators contained within the body bags. Special Better Living Industries regulation order. High-quality material. Only the best for the dead.

Isoda is watching him, like usual. She has an electronic keyboard and a plastic smile.

There isn’t any water in the faucet. He keeps trying to turn the handle, but nothing comes out; the pipes are bone-dry. The sink makes a squeaking noise of protest when he tries to push it even further to the side, half-expecting the water to suddenly appear.

“Mom!”

“What is it, honey?”

“There isn’t any water – ”

His mother comes into the kitchen looking tired. Her feet are bare, and her skin shimmers with a thin sheen of sweat. “Didn’t I tell you earlier this morning? The water got shut off because something leaked in the processing plant. The company called to tell me they’re trying to get it fixed, but it’ll be a couple hours.”

He knows all about the drought. “Can’t we go to the store and get something to drink?” he whines, pushing the faucet again.

“There should be some juice in the fridge if you’re really thirsty, or you can go to the dollar store on the corner as long as Bob can go with you. But I really do have to get this work done before my hours are up.”

The prospect of the hot concrete of the sidewalk leading Bob’s house down the block, then the idea of enduring the heat of the sun to get to the dollar store, isn’t a savory one. He pulls on his sneakers anyway, finishes the half-cup of orange juice from the fridge, then goes to get his bike from the garage.

Bob isn’t outside in his yard, because no one wants to be outside; the temperature was well over a hundred degrees when he checked that morning, and only worsening as it creeps closer to midday. He knocks on the door, sweat dripping down the back of his shirt, and waits.

The door creaks open. “Oh, Gary! Did your water get shut off, too?”

He nods. “Hi, Mrs. Fillmore. Yep, mom’s sending me to the store to get us some bottled water or something. Is Bob there?”

“Playing computer games in his room, I think.” She calls over her shoulder, “Bobby!”

Bob’s voice echoes through the house. “Xbox, mom! _What_!”

“Gary’s here!”

There’s a moment of silence, then Bob stampedes down the stairs with the game controller still dangling from one hand. “Dude, you’re out of water too? Jeez. Mom was gonna send Chessie to the grocery store if we didn’t get it turned back on within an hour.”

“I figured, yeah, cause I gotta go to the dollar store to buy some,” he says, scuffing his shoes against the linoleum floor of the kitchen. “My mom gave me some money, so I don’t have to spend my allowance or anything.”

“Cool,” says Bob. He shrugs one shoulder. “Lemme get my bike and I’ll come with you.”

Pasadena is sweltering in the summer, and the heat becomes oppressive in the throes of the drought. The TV says it’s the worst drought in decades, the kind of dryness that his mother talks about with her friends, about the lack of water. When she talks about it with him, all she says is that the rest of the country isn’t faring much better, and that he should be grateful for what he does have. Even if it’s brown sludge dripping from the faucet. Or nothing at all.

The wind in their faces as they pedal down the street, heat rising from the blacktop, helps a little.

The prices at the dollar store are ridiculous. The crumpled twenty his mother pressed into his hand before he left is barely enough for a gallon jug of lukewarm water; the freezer in the store broke a few days previously. “Boss keeps sayin’ he’ll send someone out here to fix it up,” says the cashier, dabbing at his shining forehead with a spotty cloth. “Just gotta endure until it’s over.”

“Sure thing,” says Bob politely, and accepts the change from the cashier’s sweaty fingers. “Thanks a bunch, sir!”

They have enough money in quarters and nickels to buy a lemonade popsicle, which they share on the way back home, passing the stick back and forth between the two of them until their hands are sticky and the ice has melted completely.

“I freaking hate the freaking sun,” he complains, kicking grumpily at a tuft of dry-brown grass as they lug the water jug across lawns and sidewalks, rolling their bikes beside them. It isn’t as fun now that there isn’t a breeze. “Remember when summer was _fun_?”

“At least school has freaking AC,” says Bob. He scrunches up his face, tipping his head back to prevent his glasses from sliding down his nose because of the sweat. “Dude, _high school_. Gonna be so weird.”

“So weird,” he agrees. High school is still a faraway prospect; there are only three more weeks of summer left, and yet he can’t imagine walking up the concrete steps to the main building, backpack weighing him down with new textbooks. High school is for teenagers, for girls with long legs and high-pitched laughter and colorful clothing, for boys with broad shoulders and football uniforms and facial hair. Eighth grade still feels like where he belongs.

His mother is still working when he and Bob struggle through the front door with the water; she looks up from her computer, the click-clack of her fingers on the keyboard stilling abruptly. “Oh! You’re back sooner than I expected. Hi, Bob. Crazy weather, huh?”

“Hey, Ms. Levko. What’s up,” says Bob. They drop the container onto the kitchen floor, and Bob grunts as he wipes his hands on his shirt. “Man, I think the sweat washed off the freaking popsicle goop, it’s basically like taking a real shower!”

“Ew,” he says, wrinkling his nose.

It isn’t at all like taking a real shower. Lengthy or frequent showers are a luxury regulated to different times; water rations mean restrictions. He doesn’t get to take long showers or play in the sprinklers. There haven’t been sprinklers in months. It isn’t fun to play in the yard anymore, now that the lawn is withered and dead, and besides, going outside stopped being fun a long time ago, anyway.

He and Bob pour some of the water into glasses, careful not to spill too much, then sit on the couch. He turns on the TV, and Bob kicks off his shoes. “Change the channel, c’mon, they’re just talking about the freaking fires again,” Bob whines, slouching down into the cushions.

“Fine, shut up, oh my god,” he says, and fiddles with the remote until he finds some action movie with a convoluted plot that neither of them really understands, since it’s already a third of the way through the movie anyway. But at least the explosions look badass, and there are lots of evil henchmen with complicated guns who die in dramatic, dangerous ways and leave blood and guts splattered all over the place, so it’s pretty cool.

Isoda taps away at her electronic clipboard for a moment before she turns back to the viewing screen. “They’re covered in laser burns, poor fools,” she says quietly in Japanese. “We’ll have to repattern the skin grafts if we want to calibrate the whole thing. Extra work.”

Extra work is extra pay. Quid pro quo. He doesn’t say anything to this effect, just nods, bobbing his head obediently. The reanimation process is not his area of expertise; he goes where he is directed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Call the Scarecrow in here, Levko, will you? He should have finished his debriefing with Madam Director by now. It is imperative that he reports to me before he returns to his private chambers.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He doesn’t know where the Scarecrow would be. Most likely not in the Privacy Gardens, then, if Isoda has ordered otherwise. The Scarecrow lives on the twenty-third floor. It takes approximately 5.31 minutes for the elevator to reach that height.

He goes to the cafeteria instead. The filtering tubes are shut off at this time of day, when the moon is rising perfectly round like a pre-war coin above the neat towers of Battery City. He thinks, _good_. He thinks, _safe_. He thinks, _home_.

The Scarecrow is standing by the door to the kitchen, speaking with a group of other Exterminators. They all wear their masks; their voices are staticky, robotic.

He greets the Exterminators respectfully. He recognizes that Exterminators are higher ranks than he is because of their experience. The Scarecrow, like Isoda and the Director, knows what is best. “Sir,” he says. “Madam Isoda would like to speak to you.”

“Thank you,” says the Scarecrow smoothly. Reports of his charisma have been greatly exaggerated, Isoda said once, when she was most likely not entirely sober. She has always had a fondness for irregulated substances, pills that aren’t regulation, tiny capsules in bright colors that have strange effects; another small disobedience that he will be expected to overlook. “I will meet her momentarily.”

“Yes, sir.” He bobs his head again. Isoda will be pleased.

It doesn’t become a national crisis until people start dying.

The fires – no one knows exactly where they start. Somewhere in the north, somewhere up by Oregon or the Idaho border, to the northernmost tip of California. Far from Pasadena, far from LA, far from anywhere important. There have always been wildfires during the summer droughts, but they’re spurred on by the lingering dry spell and the oppressively heavy heat.

Sometimes he sees footage on TV, clusters of desperate firefighters battling the flames ravaging the brushland and desert. It all seems very far away.

He wakes up to his mother shaking him. “ _Mom_ ,” he complains, trying to tug the sheet over his body; he hasn’t been sleeping with covers for months, but his mother doesn’t usually barge into his room at – the alarm clock says it’s three in the morning. “Mom, c’mon, ’m sleeping.”

“Gary, we have to leave, right now. They’re evacuating the city,” she says, lips pressed tightly together. “Grab a change of clothes.”

“Wha – ?”

“The city,” she says, like he didn’t hear. “We’re evacuating the area so the firemen can work. They’re bringing in helicopters for the hospitals, but we can take the minivan.”

He struggles out of bed, reaching for his pants. “The whole city?”

“I already packed us some food. Yes, the whole city.”

“Is Bob comin’ too?” he asks around a yawn as he grabs a shirt.

“The whole city,” she repeats.

The drive out of Pasadena’s suburbs is slow; the highway is clogged with traffic, other people with the same idea in their heads. His mother taps her fingernails on the steering wheel and glances restlessly out the window. She hasn’t had time to put on makeup, since it’s still before sunrise. The horizon is glowing anyway, orange and ominous.

He texts Bob a few times (dude this is frkn batshit!!! ru leaving 2??), then flips his phone shut and falls asleep in the backseat of the van, cheek pressed against the window.

Isoda is frowning as she looks at the electronic file. “Levko, you’re positive that you recorded the data correctly?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. He isn’t nervous because he’s never nervous. “Four rebel terrorists apprehended three days ago, returned to the city and placed in cryogenic detainment for pre-rehabilitation treatment under supervision of the Scarecrow. Standard Services data are always meticulously calculated. Ma’am.”

“Of course. Naturally,” she says, snapping the file shut. “Well. The file does contain the official stamp. I suppose it could be an error on the part of the higher-ups, although I suppose I would have to take the case to the Scarecrow. Maybe we could keep this between us, hm? Our little secret.”

He frowns. The situation isn’t protocol; it reminds him of Isoda’s little bottles of bright-colored irregulated pills. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, ma’am. The concealment of information is a formal offence.”

“Not concealment, just caution,” Isoda says. Her lips are pressed together. It makes her mouth look like a scar. “Levko, you lived in an evacuated area, didn’t you?”

“I lived in what is now known as Neo Pasadena until I was thirteen. Ma’am.”

“So you understand that sometimes certain information is need-to-know?”

“Yes,” he says, “ma’am. Understood, ma’am.”

He doesn’t remember the actual fires themselves, but he remembers the aftermath. The fires were set off in an unfortunate accident which spread across the western half of the country. He doesn’t know what this has to do with the terrorists whose bodies are currently being held in sustained limbo while they wait for the orders to reanimate them to come from above. He doesn’t know what this has to do with the Scarecrow. He doesn’t understand what Isoda means by _not concealment, just caution_.

When he doesn’t understand something, he goes to the doctor. The doctor increases his dosages of medications. He knows that the pills will help things get better, to remove the cautious uncertainty that keeps creeping across the back of his thoughts. He knows that uncertainty is a sign of mental instability. The world is a certain place.

He takes his medications. He medications will help him.

He remembers he lived in the suburbs of Pasadena. It was one of the last areas to be evacuated.

There isn’t anywhere for them to go. He realizes this when he wakes up again. He checks his messages to see Bob’s reply (yeah man were driving towards la?? fckn crazy), eats half a bag of corn chips and some dried fruit strips, and discovers that he’s bored. They’re still in California, creeping towards the Nevada border, slowed down by the traffic that’s clogging the highway.

He asks, “Mom, where’re we going?”

Her hands tighten on the wheel. “We’re going to stay with a friend of your father’s in Nevada for a while.”

“Until the firemen deal with everything?”

“Yes,” she says. She keeps her eyes trained ahead, watching the road; headlights are gleaming on all sides. The clock on the dashboard says it’s almost six in the morning.

The fires were six years ago, he thinks that evening, once he gets off work and takes the Battery City Transit back to his house. He closes the door and carefully takes off his shoes, placing them in the cubicle beside the front table. Everything in its place. Everything has a cubicle. His shoes go in their cubicle; he goes in Cubicle 8, Standard Services Department, 57th Floor, Building A, Battery Towers.

Dinner is rehydrated noodle soup and protein cubes. He spoons each bite into his mouth, careful to chew before swallowing. He drinks a glass of water and takes his medications. His medications will help him.

He doesn’t know what will happen if he doesn’t take them. He’s never thought before that he might want to find out.

He doesn’t remember his mother, not exactly, but he hasn’t spoken to her since he got his job in the Standard Services Department. She never moved to Battery City; he doesn’t know what became of her. It isn’t easy to imagine a world outside of Battery City.

The poor and elderly and disabled were the ones who wound up trapped in their homes, either unable or unwilling to leave their worldly possessions behind to the mercy of fire or thievery.

It was a more difficult time. Much of the programs and systems established after the fires were stopped were created to preclude any similar future disasters.

Disaster, he thinks. The word feels strange in his mouth, resting heavily on his tongue. It feels like something full of gravity, meaning. He says it aloud – “Disaster.”

He takes another dosage of his medications. He probably shouldn’t be doing that. But the pills make him better, and he wants to feel better. He doesn’t feel better. He should. He should. He doesn’t.

He can’t _not_ take his medications, so he takes more, pours them into his hand. The capsules stick in his throat.

He thinks, there wasn’t anywhere for us to go. But of course that can’t be correct, because there were government-provided subsidized housing complexes for those who didn’t have to travel far, and there were fireproof shelters put in place for those who had left everything behind.

It isn’t enough. It’s never enough; the overflow and sprawl extend from Santa Rosa to the ocean, where evacuated citizens have fled. He doesn’t know where Bob and his mother and his sister have ended up. Probably in another one of the government shelters built to keep out flames and smoke. He doesn’t get very good cell reception underground, so he really only gets to text Bob or his other friends when he and the other younger kids in the shelter get to go outside to stretch their legs, when it’s deemed safe enough to leave.

D.C. sits up and pays attention when the fires make it to Los Angeles.

Some people start calling the creeping flames a sign from God. Some call it a punishment. Some call it a warning.

His mother calls it _unfortunate_. That’s all she ever says about it, smoothing his hair back and holding tightly to his hand while they wait in line for their daily allotment of food and water. _Unfortunate_ , she says, and doesn’t say anything else.

“Isoda,” he says. He almost doesn’t recognize his own voice. “I don’t know if we’re doing the right thing.”

She turns, closing the file and holding it to her chest like it’s a living thing, something that needs protection. She doesn’t speak, but her eyes narrow, waiting. She looks—not angry, not confused. Expectant. The word tastes coppery, metallic, when he lets his tongue form the shape of it.

He forgot to take his medications that morning. Everything feels like it’s buzzing. His skin keeps itching, like one summer when he and his faceless voiceless friends got into a patch of poison oak and his skin was covered in the angry red blotches. That was pre-war, before everything was _better_. Things are different now. He should have taken his medications.

Last night, he thinks. Last night he took more pills than he was supposed to, and this morning he didn’t take any. His head hurts; something throbs painfully in the back of his skull.

“How could you have authorized the patrol to kill these people? They were children!”

“They were rebels,” says Isoda. Her face is set, emotionless. “Insurgents. Terrorists. Your choice of words. They were breaking the law, threatening our society, and we dealt with them accordingly. They were criminals who needed to be penalized.”

“They were scared! They were people, Isoda, like us. Penalization for a breach of code doesn’t have to result in termination.”

Isoda frowns. She looks careful, calculating. “They fled the city to partake in illegal terrorist activity. They tried to hurt us.”

“But they didn’t.”

“Because I got there first. And that’s how it will always be.” She snaps the file open again, dropping her eyes to scan the first page, a clear dismissal. His skin is still itching like it wants to peel off his bones. “You may take a break, Levko. Remember to take your medications.”

He goes. He takes his medications. It was a temporary insanity, he thinks. That sort of thing can happen sometimes.

“We should be grateful that we have water rations at all,” his mother says, and presses her lips into a tight line. He knows that means to stop asking.

He occasionally overhears snippets of updates through the television and the radio – besides the rationing of water, it’s become more difficult to find fresh food, since acres and acres of crops are dying. Food is expensive, these days; they can barely afford to eat, with only his mother’s meager salary.

She loses her job a few months later.

The tourism industry isn’t the one market that’s collapsed during the drought, but it’s taken a hard hit. So she works from home, in her room, and he flops on the floor in front of the plug-in fan and lets the spinning blades move the hot air around the room.

People don’t leave the air conditioning unless they absolutely must. He’s almost grateful that it’s summer, so he doesn’t have to go to school.

It’s okay. You were just confused. We can fix that.

He thinks about how the rebels, the terrorists, looked when the Scarecrow and his crew had deposited their bodies. Their skin had been unnaturally pale except for the faces and chests, where the artificial temperature controls within the body bags had flushed the blood to the surface. Someone had closed their eyes; possibly it was the Scarecrow, although the Scarecrow would hardly have been the one to zip the corpses into body bags, confiscate the garish, useless weapons, mop up the blood and dirt and scuff marks staining the smooth tiled floor.

The one with red hair had been slumped against the wall in the photos he’s seen, chin and skull shattered and eyes milky-white from laser burn. His brother had been collapsed on the floor, arms akimbo like he was trying to reach for his brother. The desert-born one had been closer to the door, but facing inwards, like he’d almost escaped then decided to turn back; he hadn’t been able to see the surveillance video of the attack, but he was there when the med techs peeled off the filthy clothes and displayed skin so riddled with laser burn it looked like badly cooked meat. The last one, with the eye patch and the ridiculous hair, had been sprawled backwards across the filthy hood of the stolen car, weapon discarded on the concrete, intact eye staring sightlessly up at the perfectly dark sky and the silent, immobile stars.

“Take their clothes to the incinerator,” Isoda had ordered. He hadn’t been the one to dispose of the items; he watched as one of Isoda’s endless underlings obediently scurried away with an industrial plastic bag.

He thinks about the basic civilian clothes the bodies were given, dull white and simple. No buttons, no zippers, no laces, just Velcro and loose fabric. They were zipped back into body bags to keep their internal temperatures stable for the reanimation process.

He doesn’t know all the details of the War. It’s the kind of thing that requires capital letters in newspapers and online articles, even if it doesn’t seem to have a better name in real life, nothing more descriptive than just the generic term.

He knows that some people have been calling it _World War III_ , because they think it’s the end of the world.

He knows that some people have been calling it _The Helium-3 War_ , because of the non-radioactive particles involved; he learned about byproducts of atomic energy in school, back when he went to school.

“They’re using the helium as a nuclear energy source,” his mother explains, when he asks. He understands that _they_ means _scientists_. He imagines them as unspecified individuals in white lab coats with bubbling test tubes.

The War has been going on for decades in various iterations, he knows that as well; he knows it’s another one of those things that grown-ups talk about in serious voices while watching the television, but it all seems distant, far away.

Something for Europe and Russia to handle; something removed from the reality of his life.

He’s seen the aftermath of the fires – burned-out houses, collapses structures, blackened trees and landscapes. He thinks the aftermath of the war might look something like that, the wake of destruction.

He remembers that he first heard about the War when he was eleven, in 2010, when he saw on the news that a bomb had been dropped on France. It seemed like an important thing at the time, a nuclear bomb in the middle of Europe, the first deployment of atomic energy in warfare since the 1940s.

The President of France had made a press statement on TV describing the issue.

“It’s going to hurt a lot of people,” his mother said, as they both watched the footage of people swarming through the streets, clutching their belongings. “A lot of people are going to lose their homes.”

The fires are kind of like that, he thinks, because there’s been a lot of hurting, and a lot of people have had to lose their homes.

It’s been almost a year since the fires started when another atom bomb is dropped.

This time it’s on American soil.

He remembers that he’s sitting on the floor on the sleeping bag he’s been using for months, ever since his mother was able to find room for the two of them in one of the shelters scattered across the southern part of California. There’s a television mounted on one wall; he and some of the other kids in the shelter sometimes sit together and watch the news, because there really isn’t much better to do.

They can’t leave the shelter because it isn’t safe.

That’s what they’ve been told.

There’s a woman on the screen, talking about the military, while video plays in the background – shaky footage of foot soldiers and tanks and olive-green trucks rolling through the Nevada desert; slightly steadier footage of important government officials shaking their heads grimly at the camera.

“This is a national crisis,” says the reporter, her voice flat even as she describes the damage done to the area around where the bomb had been dropped.

Nearly thirty thousand innocent civilians were killed from the explosion itself.

Statistics haven’t been conclusive in regards to how many will presumably die in the aftermath.

The reporter adjusts her sheaf of papers.

“Some are calling the incident a throwback to World War Two, and comparisons have been drawn to Gaza and to the skirmishes in the Middle East which occupied the public’s attention during . . .”

He knows that the bomb was Russian in origin, aimed at an oil refinery situated in the dusty desert heart of Nevada. He knows what his mother has told him, which is that America had been staying aloof – promoting the War by supplying weaponry and funds to those countries that were determined to be allies. Playing puppet-master, she says. Pulling on the strings again.

The oil seeps into the dry, burnt ground; the wildfires sweep over the desert with a renewed vengeance.

He only asks about the fires one more time – “We’re not gonna be able to go home at all, are we?” – and doesn’t mention it anymore after that.

He doesn’t want to see the look his mother got on her face when he brought it up, not ever again.

There isn’t a choice that isn’t to join the War in full. He’s learned about Pearl Harbor back when he was still able to go to school. He knows that the people are angry, hurt, scared; clamoring for retribution.

“No one knows where the Russian military found the intel to be able to pinpoint the coordinates so precisely,” the reporters say on the television, making his mother shake her head sadly. The fires are only worsening. What was a simpler situation of evacuating a few hundred thousand square acres of California blooms into a nationwide crisis.

The drought isn’t helping, the War itself isn’t helping, and the continued drone strikes aren’t helping.

It seemed so simple at the time. Something caught something else on fire, and suddenly most of the Western half of America was burning.

It doesn’t take long.

America goes from being one of the most powerful and wealthy countries to one of the poorest and weakest in only a few months. Half of the country is suddenly uninhabitable, soaked in ash and blossoming oil spills. Some people are calling it the end of the world.

The world doesn’t end like that, of course. It never does when people think it will.

He returns to the cafeteria and takes a tray from one of the filtering tubes. He sits next to some of his coworkers (Cubicle 17, Cubicle 6, Cubicle 28) and they eat in silence. He thinks, he should probably set aside some of his month’s salary of carbons to purchase extra protein cubes from the vending machine outside the cubicle room. He always gets hungry during the day.

“That used to happen to me,” one of his coworkers says sympathetically. He doesn’t remember telling her anything, but she seems to know anyway. “Have you talked to your doctor? There are certain meds that can deactivate superfluous hunger. It’s healthier to only eat three meals a day, you know.”

“Yes,” he says. “That’s a good idea.”

It is. He gets up and goes to stand in the line for a plastic cup of clean water so that he can take his lunchtime medications.

He’s eating canned soup for lunch when the newscaster on the television reports that the American government has declared a state of emergency, effective immediately, enacting wartime powers.

“Some very powerful people are going to make some very stupid decisions,” his mother says, shaking her head the way she does when she disapproves of something or thinks it’s _unfortunate_. “Maybe they’ll think they’re doing the right thing, but they won’t be. They never are.”

This time he knows better than to ask about going home.

It’s been almost two years since he’s seen Pasadena except in quick clips of drone footage shown on TV, when there are reports of the progress being made against the wildfires. He doesn’t think that their home is even there anymore.

He doesn’t know exactly when the firesafe shelter turns into a bunker. Probably it’s about the same time that the American government drops another nuclear bomb on Russia.

Nuclear piling on atomic.

He thinks, we learned about reactionary politics in school.

It seems so trivial now that it’s happening in real life.

The world outside the relative safety of the fire shelter turned bomb shelter is still burning, still collapsing. Sometimes they hear updates on the state of things, on the rapidly shrinking power resources. Mostly they hear about these sorts of things as an explanation as to why they can’t turn on the lights after it gets dark, because electricity is expensive.

Non-renewable energy is running out. Coal shortages are being reported globally – they have been for years, but no one really seems to care until the estimate of how much time is left goes from _several decades_ to _a few months at this current rate_. Only a few countries, such as Japan and Germany and Jordan, have allowed their governments to pursue clean energy. The global economy is suffering drastically.

Sometimes businesspeople make speeches on the TV as well. He doesn’t watch those as often, uninterested; they use a lot of jargon that he doesn’t understand. Stocks and shares don’t mean as much as they did before the bombs started to fall.

He didn’t miss school at first, but it’s been years, and he sometimes lets himself think about the comforting familiarity of the routine. There have been some halfhearted attempts to get together the younger children and teach them, but textbooks are few and far between, and there aren’t many being written at the time.

The records constructed after the wars are all over will tell a markedly different story from how it really happened. Or maybe they won’t; it’s difficult to tell, in the aftermath, what’s real and what’s not.

What happened and what remains as myth.

Everyone who lives through those years remembers when the first television broadcast comes on to deliver the news that Australia no longer exists.

Vanished.

Gone.

An entire country, an entire continent – wiped off the map.

It’s difficult to comprehend the severity of the damage, while he’s holed up in a metal bunker, waiting out the worst of the storm. Australia seems like a distant unreality, something he’s never seen in person, somewhere he’s never been. It doesn’t change anything for him, now that it’s been destroyed.

Then the tired-looking reporter announces other countries that have been obliterated.

One by one, over a period of several months: England, both Koreas, most of Western Europe, over half of the Middle East, South and Central America. France is bombed again, and those who had managed to stay after the first bomb are gone for good.

This time, the French President doesn’t make a speech on the TV.

This is mainly because he is presumed dead.

One of the women whispers to his mother that there are rumors that certain parts of Iceland and Greenland are still inhabitable, but the nuclear fallout isn’t exactly slowing the progress of the ice melt.

The global temperature shifts. The atmosphere itself is altered.

No one had really anticipated the fallout from a full-on nuclear war until it happened.

Things change a lot in those few years.

Some changes are drastic, such as the loss of much of the world. Some other changes are more difficult to observe, particularly from the darkness of a fortified bomb shelter.

He knows about corporations and global monopolies, of course; that much had been established long before the first bombs fell. He remembers when his mother lost her job. He remembers going to the dollar store with his friends on the weekends, buying cheap candy and soft drinks.

He’s playing solitaire with some of the other kids in the bunker when he learns about the destruction of Washington, D.C., and the surrounding metropolises.

The first thing that comes to mind is an old fact he learned in school, about a designated survivor. He wonders who that is, this time; if there’s anybody at all.

It reminds him of a line from a book he once read – _a hit, a very palpable hit_. He hasn’t read a novel in nearly three years.

This is where Better Living Industries comes in.

He takes his medications. His medications will help him.

He doesn’t think about the future. The aftermath is secondary; the present is the focus. Or maybe it’s the other way around. He doesn’t think about. He doesn’t. He doesn’t. He doesn’t think. He doesn’t know if he remembers how.

It’s easier this way. He gets up. He eats breakfast. He takes his medications.

He goes to work. He goes to the cafeteria for lunch. He takes his medications.

He returns home. He eats dinner. He takes his medications. He watches Fact News on the television so that he can stay informed, because educated citizens are healthiest. He gets ready for bed. He takes his medications. He puts on his headphones and goes to sleep.

Sometimes he can’t sleep. He tells his doctor this; his doctor gives him another bottle of pills. He sleeps better after that.

Things are okay. Things are better.

***

Eri Takahashi gets up when the sun rises over the mountains in the distance. She makes herself a modest breakfast – bread and butter, and a pot of tea – and reads the electronic newspaper on her FlatScreen while she eats. She breaks off a corner of the bread to feed to Maneki and Daruma, who wind their tails around her wrists and purr loudly in gratitude.

She cleans the dishes after she finishes eating, and turns on her laptop to finish drafting the email she plans to send to the American government. She has something that they want, and they have something that she wants.

It will be a good partnership.

Japan has been harboring Eri Takahashi’s company, Better Living Industries, in its back pocket for years. The company was birthed in 2001 as a purely Japanese corporation dedicated to promoting scientific research. Eri Takahashi ensures that the company advocated for universal education and healthcare as well as pacifism and amity between nations.

It will do no good for the war to continue.

As a budding company, Better Living Industries helps those with chronic or terminal illness, developing drugs meant at first to ease their pain, then to erase it. Eri Takahashi has read all the stories gushing about her company’s success – _the dedicated team of scientists meddles with genetics, neurons, and the connections between hormone levels and the amygdala._ She never tires of helping people.

She knows that the influence of Better Living Industries has begun to spread out across the globe. Like most corporations, the practices of offshoring and outsourcing are built deep into their company policy.

She thinks this will probably make it easier for the Americans to become acclimated to her proposals.

Ten years ago, controlling Better Living Industries meant nothing other than what it was at face value. Now, controlling Better Living Industries means that Eri Takahashi also effectively controls Japan.

She is careful to keep her position off the record and behind the scenes. The puppet-master hasn’t yet declared herself as the one behind the curtain, pulling the right strings at the right times.

Probably the Americans will relate to this as well.

Eri Takahashi has become somewhat of a household name in Japan in the decade that she has been spearheading Better Living Industries.

She turns off the electronic newspaper as she settles in front of her computer. There has arrived a momentary reprieve from the constant bombing of the East Coast of America, and she plans to take advantage of it.

She will make her proposal extremely tempting.

She asks for a meeting with America’s government and de facto leaders. She promises that Japan will be able to aid America not only in winning the war but also in restoring the country to its former glory afterwards. She outlines, extraordinarily carefully, the sorts of things that Japan can do.

Eri Takahashi still speaks as the mouthpiece of Japan, not of Better Living Industries. But there is still time.

Her proposal is accepted, just as she knew it would be. She strokes Maneki’s spine while she searches for a plane ticket within her budget.

She has always wanted to visit America. It is a shame that the voyage had to take place in the middle of a nuclear war.

And so the few remaining leaders of the once-and-future greatest nation gather together and have a very serious tête-à-tête.

Most of them have never heard of Eri Takahashi before the cordial email she sends them from the comfort of her simple apartment. This is intentional.

Japan knows that Eri Takahashi doesn’t enjoy these sorts of meetings, and often prefers to send someone in her place when her presence isn’t absolutely required.

The rumor that flies throughout Japan is that she spends most of her time in her apartment, alone, working steadfastly on curing disease ubiquitously.

She dismisses this rumor whenever she hears it.

Daruma and Maneki are always with her; she does not consider herself _alone_.

The thing about Eri Takahashi is that she doesn’t intend to become a dictator. She doesn’t even intend to create a dystopia.

Eri Takahashi starts off as a young, impressionable woman in her mid-thirties who wants to save the world. She has a younger sister who is an accomplished cellist and two black-and-white cats named after two different types of luck. She has several bookshelves of American novels to help her in her efforts to learn English. She likes Bauhaus architecture because it’s neat and orderly, and she likes classical music because she’s studied the effects of certain types of music on the brain after her sister Kira’s struggle with depression. Eri Takahashi just wants to help people.

She and her team of dedicated researchers begin to develop a drug that will be able to get rid of Kira Takahashi’s depression by carefully adjusting the dopamine and serotonin levels in her brain.

Kira is all too willing to be the first experimental guinea pig in a long chain of others; she dutifully does what her older sister asks of her, and reports back how she feels, what she eats and when, if she notices anything out of the ordinary, every time her medication levels are adjusted.

It’s a perfect little scientific study.

And it works. Somehow, it works.

Eri Takahashi’s anti-depression medication is the first of many breakthroughs, and she gets a promotion which moves her from _researcher_ to _director_. She starts to have more control. Eri Takahashi likes control, because it means she can keep an eye on everything.

The way she thinks about it is, I can live a normal boring life, or I can live _better_.

When faced with the options and the opportunity, most people would choose to live _better_. Eri Takahashi will provide those options and the opportunity.

She does not ask, better than _what_.

It doesn’t matter.

It takes Eri Takahashi eight years and several medical _eureka!_ moments before she becomes the head and face of Better Living Industries, but the time and struggle are worth it.

Kira is happier.

Everyone is happier.

The high is incredible: Eri Takahashi can make people happier, and she never wants to stop.

Anyone can have a good day. She wants to have a _better_ day.

 _Keep Smiling!_ starts off as a promise – a mission statement. Somewhere along the way, it becomes a command.

An order.

A threat.

She doesn’t mean for anyone to suffer.

The slip from _I am doing this for the greater good_ to _I am doing this whether or not you like it, know about it, and want it_ is easier than she expects it to be. She doesn’t want to hurt anybody. She doesn’t want to make anybody feel bad. Sometimes she doesn’t want them to feel at all.

After all, Eri Takahashi just wants to help people.

No matter the cost.

She doesn’t have a moment where she thinks, I know better than the ordinary citizens of Japan because I am a scientist and a woman who does her research. In the end, all she thinks is, I am going to help people, and I know the best way to do that, so that way is what is going to happen.

And it does.

America’s state of emergency means it’s easy for Better Living Industries to slip in and take control. Better Living Industries – no one is pretending that Japan is the false front to the movement, not anymore – gives out chemical weapons, heavy artillery, all sorts of handy military-grade stuff.

Eri Takahashi controls the entirety of the old Japanese military, and she puts it to good use.

More importantly, Better Living Industries gives out bombs.

Classic bombs, shells with kicks, casks of lead. Stuff that died out in the second World War because it was too dangerous. The difference is that this time it’s enhanced. This is Better Living Industries’ trademark and Eri Takahashi’s creed – _enhancement_. Removal of what’s superfluous and enhancement of the beneficial.

This is how they’ll win the war against – well, against Russia, and also what’s left of Europe. Borders don’t mean as much anymore.

They’re conventional weapons used. But when the dust clears, the rest of the world isn’t much of anything at all.

This is in 2017. The war is almost over. Maybe the world hasn’t ended yet; opinions differ on the matter.

Eri Takahashi is soaring quietly above the world.

It happens like this.

The blast radius from the bombs detonated on American soil covers most of the contiguous states, with only Hawai’i and Alaska being spared the worst of the blow. Hawai’i is below sea level now and has been for several years, and Alaska isn’t much more than slush and melting snow at this point, so it’s a moot point anyway.

The East Coast is gone, wiped off the map, obliterated.

The formerly-United States barely exist. When the smoke and smog from the mushroom clouds finally begin to clear away in the stained sky, what remains is a wasteland.

Better Living Industries steps in, smooth and efficient, and starts to gather up the broken fragments of the country to piece them back together.

One of the first things that they do is to clean up the bombed-out oil refineries by establishing Dead Pegasus Gasoline throughout the country, wiping out Shell and Exxon Mobil and BP in one fell swoop. The company has been a global supplier of oil since 2012 anyway, when Better Living Industries began this particular chain of their corporate nation, but now it’s ubiquitous.

The logo is based on something Takahashi designed. The pegasus is supposed to be another type of luck.

Now that the problem of oil spills has been eliminated, they stop the wildfires.

It’s almost an afterthought at this point. So much has been burning for so long, it’s easier than anyone would have guessed to get used to it.

But then the acid rain starts – it doesn’t melt anyone’s skin off the way it does in the movies, but it can make you sick if you’re exposed to it for long enough, just like the radiation; both are collateral from the fallout of the constant barrage of heavy nuclear weaponry and constant pollution.

Security and sanctuary are needed.

And from this come the cities.

There are other city-hubs before Battery City, spread out across the world, little hidey-holes where radiation can’t reach. Japan is still mostly untouched – later, Japan will become a country of mystery, a possible paradise and a possible hell, something that doesn’t seem possible.

A place untouched by the worst of the radiation? It seems impossible.

Some radiation seeped over from the West Coast into the ocean and subsequently to the battered remnants of the two Koreas and the flourishing commoditized cell of China, of course, but Japan has managed the aftermath as best as it could hope to.

Everyone wants to be hidden, to feel safe. Everyone wants to imagine a perfect problem-free paradise across the poisonous ocean.

Battery City comes next. It’s advertised as _the last safe place in America_. The citizens will welcome everyone with open arms.

No one says _or else_. Not yet.

And while the broken and damaged people are streaming into the new shelter, Better Living Industries stakes out the remaining habitable areas of the country. They draw lines in the sand – six Zones, six rings of the desert, expanding away from the new center of civilization.

Battery City.

The radiation worsens the farther from the city you travel. After the final Zone – Zone Six, where the radiation is supposedly so strong you would die within a few days of exposure – the radiation belt becomes impassible.

Supposedly.

 _The miles-long Elephant’s Foot_ , the reporters on the TV like to call it.

Eri Takahashi just calls it the _Belt_.

Water and food supplies are horribly damaged. Arable land is horribly damaged. Natural resources are horribly damaged. The world as a whole is horribly damaged. Better Living Industries is gracefully picking up the broken pieces.

To phrase it delicately: Better Living Industries is taking over the world.

It’s the next logical step for corporate monopolies anyway.

Eri Takahashi just wants to help people to live _better_.

The story Better Living Industries spins is that the desert has been rendered uninhabitable due to being plagued by acid rain, radiation, and – subsequently – terrorist activity. Terrorists are popular scapegoats, because their nationality and belief systems can be left ambiguous while still garnering the populace’s general hatred.

People are scared and desperate and Better Living Industries is promising to protect them – and it does start out as protection, at first. Eri Takahashi wanted to help people, and helping people is what her rapidly expanding corporation does best.

Sometimes the truth must be bent for the greater good. Eri Takahashi reminds herself of this through gritted teeth.

Better Living Industries lies about the effects of acid rain and radiation. Better Living Industries also lies about the length of radioactive half-lives. The particles have mostly decayed by the time 2018 rolls around, by the time the Analog Wars begin.

In the years since the bombings first started, there have been some people who have refused to surrender to the apocalypse. Even after the radiation kills off the first wave of them, there are lone survivors, stragglers wandering the desert.

Some of them die.

 _Most_ of them die.

The radiation is still damaging to everyone exposed; Better Living Industries has only exaggerated the effects. Take the truth and make it worse than it seems.

It is an effective method of control.

These people, the ones staking their claims outside the walls of Better Living Industries’ little project-cities, are early prototypes of _killjoys_.

Not everyone within the cities subscribes to Better Living’s perfect little washed-out utopia. Better Living hasn’t pushed the medications upon anyone yet, beyond a few here and there when they treat injuries or illnesses, nothing out of the ordinary. They _are_ still a company at heart, naturally, and they want to make sales and generate revenue.

But not everyone goes along with what they want.

That’s when the second “war” begins.

The Analog Wars are short and brutal – “cyberterrorists” working to “destabilize the city from within” and “failing miserably” – and end in a massacre. The media outlets that remain tell the stories that Eri Takahashi wants them to tell.

Better Living Industries finds the rebels in question.

Better Living Industries deals with them.

Publicly. With lots of blood left on the white stone streets.

That’s when they bring in the first draft of what will become _draculoids_ , years later. Better Living Industries says that they’re upping the security measures within Battery City limits for the safety of every citizen. Probably they are, at first. It is hardly the first time that a police state has been established.

And as for the atomic shell known as the Pig Bomb: Better Living drops it on the desert, outside of the city’s safe walls, as a warning.

A threat.

A demonstration of sorts: _this is what we can do_.

Eri Takahashi thinks that this is the sort of methodology that the Americans should understand as well.

Probably they aren’t _Americans_ anymore.

The bomb is left somewhere in the wreckage of the East Coast, near to what could have been Virginia, half a decade ago. It’s not much more than rubble and ruin anymore.

But inside the city, the citizens barely even know. The people killed off by the Pig Bomb are named as Russian terrorists trying to perpetuate the enmity between nations, mentioned a few vague times in newspaper articles or on television broadcasts. After a few years, the nationality part of the appellation drops off, but the concept of mysterious terrorists living dangerous and elusive in the supposedly uninhabitable desert is a thrilling tale to recount over the dinner table in safe, snug houses, far from the bombs.

In the 1940s, the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan, resulting in the deaths of millions of innocent civilians. In 2017, Japan coerces the United States into dropping an atom bomb on the Eastern Coast of America.

The Civil War called, the few newspapers that bother to report the goings-on write on their headlines; it wants its methodology back. World War Two is feeling cheated. Maybe it’s time to own up to the fact that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

It doesn’t really matter in the end who copies whom, as long as it’s effective – the one quality in which Better Living Industries allows itself to feel an element of pride at a good technique carried out well.

Eri Takahashi leaves her sister and her two cats in Japan and moves to the bombed-out exclusion zone of the California desert where Battery City is located, so that she can try to piece the world back together until it looks the way she wants it to look. America’s center of business has been shifting and fading ever since the first attacks on the East Coast began, years ago; California, despite the lingering aftermath of the wildfires of 2012, is still the safest place to be.

Much of the cities and settlements were never rebuilt after the destruction caused by the wildfires. Rebuilding is useless; Better Living Industries creating something new. The country has fallen to pieces, but it’s too late for it to be saved.

Focus on inventing something else instead of scrambling to keep the old world from falling apart.

If the world were going to end, it would have by now.

Maybe it already has. It’s difficult to tell sometimes.

Better Living brings in their cyberkinetic technology to fix things up. They offer 3D-printed skin grafts. Artificial limbs. Motorized internal organs and electric systems. And, as always, medication that comes in the form of swallowable pills to regulate hormones and neurons and emotions and everything, everything.

Everything is very carefully controlled. Regulated. The structure is comforting, for some people.

There are always people who slip through the cracks, however. There are rumors that one of Eri Takahashi’s own original team rebelled against what she and the others were doing with the medications, that he gathered a few loyal supporters and tried to destroy the experimental medication doses. That, although he failed, he set back the researchers by a significant amount. That he and a handful of others managed to escape into the desert, and that Eri Takahashi hasn’t seen him since.

Some say that it’s Eri Takahashi’s personal vendetta. Some say that this is why she hates the rebels in the desert so much.

The truth is that Eri Takahashi doesn’t hate anybody. She didn’t hate the man she thought was her friend when he tried to blow up her laboratories, and she doesn’t hate him now that he’s running around in the radiation-soaked desert trying to organize some sort of a revolution.

She has better things to do, people to make happier, cities to construct.

Worlds to save.

Eri Takahashi just wants to make people live _better_. Live better, no matter what and no matter how.

2019 is a new year.

The year heralds new initiatives introduced to the protective police force of Battery City, the _draculoids_.

There is a time of alleged prosperity within the city’s walls, and famine without.

The world in the aftermath of war is a damaged ruin slowly starting to grow again.

The desert is full of monsters who think the city is full of monsters who think the desert is full of monsters.

And Eri Takahashi is on top of the world.

She crosses her legs and looks down at the colossal sprawl of her creation. She is extremely satisfied with her position.


End file.
